My grandparents, Serge and Charlotte Zweibel, fled Austria for the remote island of Tahiti in the late 1930s to escape the Nazis. My grandfather’s employer, an international shoe company, made my grandparents’ relocation possible. The company’s benevolence allowed him to provide for his family and keep his wife and her parents safe during the scariest and most uncertain of times. After several years, my grandparents decided to move to the United States so that their children – my mom and my uncle, both born in Tahiti – could get a good education. It took them years to get through the U.S. quota system and into the country. They drove from New York to California in 1950, selling Tahitian wares as they went. They settled into a small apartment in a good school district until they could afford to buy a house. My grandfather took a bus across town to a factory every day until he saved enough money to open his own shoe store, where he, my grandmother and a small, close-knit group of employees worked seven days a week for decades. My grandparents’ journey and their labor taught me the importance of responsibility, striving for more, and treating people well. In their eyes, there was always something else they could do through hard work, foresight, the kindness of others (and a little luck) to improve their own lives, the lives of their children and the lives of others. They are now long gone but their lessons and legacies endure.
Vicki Shabo is the Vice President of the National Partnership for Women & Families
Photo via Flickr user Pierre J. under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
